Whether you live in a cold or hot climate, you know that the quality of your home’s heating and cooling system significantly impacts your comfort and utility bills. You could be spending a fortune to heat an empty house or not have enough air conditioning to stop cloying humidity from stealing the breath out of you in the summer.
Heating and cooling systems are complicated, expensive, and require professional installation.
If you’re like me, this is a concern. I’ve always felt uncomfortable replacing my house’s old mechanical and ducted gas systems. Once you’ve spent thousands of dollars on energy costs because your system has to run 24 hours a day, why on earth would you want to spend an additional $500 or more for a new one?
Short answer: it’s probably not necessary. If you want to lower your electric bill and cut down on the amount of energy your Russell’s Heating and Cooling systems use, the most convenient way is to upgrade the efficiency of your existing systems.
How to get better cooling AND heating results with your existing systems:
Reduce the amount of air your system needs by improving the efficiency of your heating and cooling devices in two ways: 1) increase the size of your heat exchanger (the device that exchanges heat); 2) improve the efficiency of your fan and motor. Here’s how.
Increase the Size of Your Heat Exchanger:
As we already mentioned above, you should be able to decrease either or both of these factors by at least 50% with one tweak. The basic principle behind this is that if you increase the area through which air passes, you’ll have less air coming into contact with each part of your system. And you can get two separate units that do the job of one.
Two separate air conditioning units in your house:
When you have two separate air conditioning units, each one runs at a lower temperature. If you’re already spending money on an air conditioning unit in the country or other heat-intense environment, why not add a second, smaller one to your living room or den? You’ll immediately see a reduction in energy bills.
You can make your existing living room unit more efficient by doing this. Then you won’t have to replace it. Though you might still want to upgrade the efficiency of its fan and motor, as discussed below.
There are two major types of air conditioners: refrigerant-driven and electric-driven. By changing to a more efficient one, you’ll be able to lower the temperature by up to 25%! That means you can get a more efficient unit for less money. And if your unit already runs at a lower temperature, you’ll be able to save even more by simply exchanging it for one that does so at yet lower temperatures.
